Has anyone ever seen anything like this?!?!?! What has happened here?!?

First guess would be a collapsed bearing allowing drastic misalignment of the gear meshing.  

Bill

WOW!!!

I literally woke the neighbours when I removed the cover this morning

Oh man.That's nasty !

It looks arid in that assembly. Was there much fluid removed?

A bearing collapse or a tooth fractures and then one piece of lose metal then two and next thing it's all over.
I haven't seen a K do it before but the early Goldwings were very good at it and the Z1300 Kawasakis were known for sounding like a bag full nuts and bolts.

ouch.... sad to see Floyd
commiserations mate '

Feel like crying!  

I have a Paralever here that needs new pivot bearings or bushes. I guess Ill take that route.

Ive just opened up the para FD and the gears look like new....The crown wheel tapered roller bearing is loose on the shaft and appears to have even spun on the shaft though......

If the bearing has no play clean it with acetone and use some loctite for shafts and bearings, it should be OK there is not a big load on that bearing.

Loosen big nut which holds pinion, probably. Pinion with a lot of freeplay lost position and went too deep.
Dont ask me how I know.

That's exactly what my friend told me happens when the big bearing gets any play in it.

I went to him and said I thought there was a bearing out somewhere in the final drive as it was road speed related and not engine speed or gears. He went straight for that bearing and said it was on the way out. I had barely felt it but he was a dab hand on it. That was only 2 months after we did the rear main seal clutch etc etc etc.

Unconnected but a coincidence as we never touched the final drive.

Trouble is that when the bearing starts going you don't feel it at first.

Just been to see Tor Motors in Yandina (BMW only mechanic) and he seems to be of the opinion final drives need to be rebuilt at intervals to prevent catastrophic failures such as this....Reckons the R1200's are the worst for it and he has seen diffs fail in under 20,000kns - which is rather absurd. 

Anyways, took my spare paralever into him for a bit of an evaluation and he is adamant that I should have new crown wheel bearings fitted...parts and labor will be around $600 which is a massive kick in the gonads for an unexpected bit of work....

Id do it myself if calculating the shim sizes wasnt such a ball ache.

The earlier R1200s were bad for both gearbox and rear drive but up until the last of the K1100s I would say the failure rate on drives was no worse than any other brand. I have seen early Ks with 400,000k on them and the drive is still going strong.
I think he sees a lot of BMW drive failures because he works mainly on BMWs. Like me saying I have seen 10 times as many Honda drives fail as to anything else but that's because I worked for Honda for 8 years.
BMW did change the drive about 2005-6 on the Rs and on the Ks when the across the frame 4 was introduced because they very obviously couldn't handle the torque.

What surprised me most about what he said was that the diffs should be rebuilt as a maintenance item...No idea what intervals etc but he reckons when he services a bike he can tell what kind of condition the bearings are in and whether or not to rebuild at that stage...

Which makes me hesitant to purchase a used one...although it would be around half the cost of a rebuild...I guess the rebuild is the better value proposition as Id essentially have a brand new paralever with new pivot bushes to boot. hmmmm this K has kost me more than Id like...but thats motorcycles to some extent I guess...I need a higher paying job...

My friend here who is also ex BMW said the same thing about replacing as a service item but he was referring to the pivot bearings on the later self destructing types rather than the K mono lever or Paralever ones. However just changing the big bearing is not so difficult as one might believe if you are doing them all the time. My mate can set a bolt to a required torque setting and then check it with a torque wrench to find its exact, just like a musician of experience can produce a perfect C. Doing that big bearing seems to be a wise move and after what I saw I think I would pull it at a defined mileage as it doesn't take much to do it.

Rather strangely my K had a strange incident August last year which was about 8k miles before the bearing went. The final drive oil started pissing out of it and it ran hot. So I changed the oil, did it again for a few days, changed the oil a second time and the problem disappeared and it went back to running at normal temperatures. No idea what happened or why. However I did keep an eye on it and then started to feel a barely perceptible change in the drive.

The early 16 tooth RS drive is like hens teeth and if you have one of those worth swapping the bearing if the drive is good.

92KK 84WW Olaf wrote:Rather strangely my K had a strange incident August last year which was about 8k miles before the bearing went. The final drive oil started pissing out of it and it ran hot. So I changed the oil, did it again for a few days, changed the oil a second time and the problem disappeared and it went back to running at normal temperatures. No idea what happened or why. However I did keep an eye on it and then started to feel a barely perceptible change in the drive.

Interesting you say that Olaf as I recall that my diff got hot to the touch shortly before I parked it away to go travelling. Dont know why I was checking it but started feeling it after a ride and it was hot as f%$&. Then it got parked....now im back and I did 200kms on it and all the way I was thinking "oh wow something sounds bloody awful" so finally I opened the case and found the loveliness depicted above....

So, heres the latest...I just made a payment to Ben at BSK Speedworks for a rebuilt 16t final drive....shipped to Aus all for a very very reasonable price....much much less than getting the paralever rebuilt locally.

So for less then half of the price of rebuilding a paralever, Ill get a rebuilt mono with a new OEM seal delivered in 4-5 days....good outcome for a horrible situation...

that's a win Floyd

goodonya Ben ...

I have always had a habit of checking temperature on a few things when I travel.

On the K I always feel the final drive for temperature and that was the first alert I had to a problem, along with the oil coming out due to an overheat. Anything out of kilter increases friction which means heat generally well before you have a catastrophic problem..

I also out of habit have always checked bike wheels for bearing temperature.

Towing a trailer I always check the wheel hubs for temperature as in any sign of an overheating bearing.